Thursday, October 17, 2013

Stars Without Number and Starbound

In a nutshell, you play a member of 6 (7 now) races who are exiled from their homeworld for various reasons. They have a ship, a mining tool, and precious little else. They travel around finding random planets, weird monsters, lost gears, and mine/build/and survive their way to a new micro civilization.

I love these kinds of games. I also love Sandboxy Space games like Traveller and Stars Without Number.

See a theme here?

Well, I've been pondering a mix of Kingmaker (Pathfinder fame) mixed with SWN using the theme of a game like Starbound. Land on a world, fight monsters and pirates, set up a colony, manage and grow it, and eventually take on those that cast you out from your homeworld.

The cool thing is SWN supports loads of random world generation. You can find space ports, civilizations in various stages in development, lost relic tech gear, etc. And it's all very easy to run since it uses the OSR base.

The only thing I'd have to crib up is a base resource management tree. Something to track how much gear and or material the group has to spend at one time. This is where the Ultimate Campaign book from Pathfinder comes in. They have a Kingdom building rule system. (And a base building option) All I need to to is translate the credits into resources of a techier setting and some of the structures need to be updated to space friendly options. Tada!

And if I wanted to get tricky I could throw in Other Dust's ruined city rules!

About Me

Heya folks! Joe here, Dungeon Master for hire...well I don't charge but I AM looking to run games and have fun. I've been around the US and to Japan and generally am an omnivorous geek. I enjoy it all: Comics, Video Games, Roleplaying, Books, TV, and some movies. Mostly a Fantasy and SciFi junkie. I put the Dragon back into Dungeons and Dragons. (And GURPS, L5R, Eclipse Phase, look I like a lot of games okay?)